May 16, 2012

.... It looks like a home-run hitter's park, and when the wind blows out, it is. But when the wind screams off the lake, the park turns nasty. Even balls headed for the seats are reduced to routine flies. For the Cubs, MacPhail said, every game might as well be away... 2. Wrigley Field is too damn nice.

Going to the park is so pleasant, the game itself has become secondary. The sunshine, the lake air, the red brick—that's what draws the crowds. The bleachers are filled even when the team is terrible, which takes pressure off of the owners....

3. Losing some of the time makes you want to win; losing all of the time makes you a loser....

Extreme. I like historic preservation, and it's nice for the fans to have a nice day in the park, and convenient for the other teams to have this losing team to beat. But the losing record really is shocking, especially compared to the winning record before the team moved to Wrigley in 1916:

61 comments:

How the times change. Having grown up in Chicago, I can remember when it was a Joe Biden that they were going to add lights to Wrigley. LIGHTS! SACRILEGE!!!

I have many fond memories of weekday afternoon games at Wrigley, but have long since hung my martyr cross on the wall after moving to St Louis. In STL, we recently ended the first Busch Stadiums' run and replaced it with a sparkling new stadium that I have yet to run into a detractor about. Now, if we could just keep our beer garden tents anchored properly.

If Wrigley DOES get the axe and rebuilt, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, Hollywood, take advantage of it. Use it to film a post-apocalyptic something and blow the shit out of it in the process.

Given that both teams play on the same field, it seems that that it just takes a little more advanced math, like greater than zero, for the Cubs to win. The Cubs need to look at parsing out the contributions to victory as exemplified in Moneyball and tilt the composition for which way the wind is blowing. You might call it the Bob Dylan shift. The park is nice and the L a few blocks away clears the crowd in an instant compared to, say, the Rangers ballpark.

One theory about why the Cubs are "cursed" is that playing home day games and away nighgt games screws up their daily routine. Every other team in the league works a swing shift; the Cubs are constantly between working days and swing, depending on if they are at home or on the road. Over six months that wears on you.

This theory was put forth quarter jokingly by a former major league ballplayer.

All the Yuppies won't let that Wrigley be torn down. Wrigley isn't a ballpark, it's a yuppie enclave and God knows the Cubs aren't a baseball team. I can hardly stand to go there anymore. There are yuppies just chattering in the row behind you about everything but the game. We lived on Waveland Ave., 8 blocks from the park in the early 80's. That's when actual fans went to games. Of course, the Cubs sucked, but @ least it was a ballpark back then. That was before lights were installed.

Yep. I moved to St Louis at 18 and have decided when the Rams moved here that I would adopt STL teams as my own. It was much more difficult dropping the Bears and Blackhawks than it was the Cubs...for the obvious reason :)

I certainly hope ndspinelli wasn't one of those fans Lee Elia spoke of so eloquently back in '83.

Back then the problem was that only unemployed bums went to Wrigley. Today the problem is that only yuppies go to Wrigley. Or tourists. The only constant seems to be that only the wrong kind of people go there.

The main difference b/w WF and those "real" ballparks people seem to hold in such high esteem is that WF's upper deck isn't a half-mile from the field with a pitch of about 60° because of huge luxury boxes. Instead, the corporate suits' suites are squeezed into a tiny space with crappy sight lines.

ChipS, As I related previously @ another venue, I was @ that infamous Lee Elia game when Les Grobstein caught the postgame tirade. I wasn't unemployed, just working "out in the field" for the law firm I worked for @ the time. I was w/ there w/ my partner PI and the youngest son of Ray Meyer, Bob Meyer.

It's got to be the last of the old style ball parks and should be a National Historic Site. The Cubs went all the way there. Granted, it was WWII and all the good players were otherwise occupied, but still...

"edutcher said...It's got to be the last of the old style ball parks and should be a National Historic Site. The Cubs went all the way there. Granted, it was WWII and all the good players were otherwise occupied, but still..."

The Cubs will never win anything until they get out of Wrigley. (They may win a one-off, but that is about it). The curse of Wrigley Field isn't that goat from 1945, it's Bill Wrigley and his romanticizing day baseball. The Cubs play 2/3 of their home games under the sun, while their competitors play about 1/3. If they could normalize their schedule to 2/3 night games then it might make sense to stay there. But guess what, the neighborhood idiots (most of them democrats) would never allow it. NIMBY!!!! That is part of the curse of Wrigley. If he had gone to mostly night games in the late 50s or early 60s there would have been little resistance as the neighborhood was far from the yuppie glory hole it is now. Also there is no such thing as a long out there. (Ya, I know the wind blows in at times but you tell me when and how to predict it) I don’t care if you are Sandy Koufax or Bob Gibson, you are going to leave a couple of pitches out and over the plate every game, and since the Cubs end up with guys like Lynn McGlothen & Steve Trout that happens with great frequency and with predictable results. Mr. Gorbachev tear down this Park!!!!

Makes sense. Maybe MLB could, with the players association, look into changing the schedule. It might make sense to have 2-3 week home stands then 2-3 weeks away. I like it that there is one place where there are day games. The Illinois weather allows it.

EMD--fair point, then please explain why how the Cubs could have four Hall of Famers on one team in the late 60s and early 70s and not win anything???!!! Along with a number of solid major leaguers like Kenny Holtzman and Randy Hudley?? Also please explain "Wichita" Willie Hernandez, the closer for the Cubs in the early 80s, who was very mediocre and then goes to the Tigers and becomes a world class closer?? We, (my fellow drunks in the bleachers) nick-named him "Wichita" because that was the Cubs Triple A affiliate and which is where we felt he belonged. Can you say, fly ball pitcher? Can you say Tiger Stadium? Can you say 1984 World Champions? (EMD, I don’t mean to sound like I am picking on you, it is just that I wish more people would be open to the idea that Wrigley itself is a problem for the Cubs no matter what they do to it).

EMD--fair point, then please explain why how the Cubs could have four Hall of Famers on one team in the late 60s and early 70s and not win anything???!!!

It's very difficult to win in baseball no matter where you play. I can attest, being a Cleveland Indians fan. (1954, 1995, 1997, 2007).

Also, short series playoffs in baseball a basically a crap shoot. That's why you have the 2006 Cardinals and such. It just takes 3 good to decent pitching performances to win any series.

As for the 1984 Detroit Tigers, they were a pretty awesome team that won 104 games. And you traded WIllie Hernandez too soon, even when he was having a good year for you (19.2 innings in 11 games, with 18 strikeouts.)

ChipS, You're correct about the great restaurants after the game. Went to a Cards/Cubs game a few years back. We walked to one of my fav restaurants, Las Fuentes, after the game. The Cubs lost a tough one. We walked to Las Fuentes which is @ Halsted and Wrightwood. When we got to the outdoor patio there was Dusty Baker drinking a margarita! I don't know how the fuck he beat us. He had 2 blondes[knockouts] w/ him. As he walked by our table he chatted us up, 2 of our group had Card hats on. I think having a blonde sandwich cheered him up after the game. He's a nice guy, which should come as no surprise.

The developer that gets tagged to build the new one could make serious bank by selling raffle tickets in St Louis for a chance to be the one that pushes the button firing the implosion of Wrigley Field.

If a small baseball park with outdated facilities forces a team into a losing record, please explain the Red Sox and Fenway Park to me. Yeah, the Red Sox have had a rough time so far this year, but in the last 10 years they've been in the playoffs 5 times and have won 2 World Series in a park that's both older and smaller than Wrigley.

The problem isn't the field, folks, it's the ownership. The Red Sox were mired in failure for years and people wanted to blame the park. Then they got new ownership and they started to win.

I don't know how it works in Wisconsin but here in Los Angeles any poll done by the LA Times generally over-estiminates the liberal vote by 5%. After the election the paper always explains away its lousy forecasts as a function of all people who supposedly "waited till the last minute" to take up their minds.

The Cubs are already making Mesa, AZ foot the bill for their new spring training stadium (because their current fifteen-year-old stadium is SO outdated). No one that lives in the city that you talk to can explain how it passed...